I’m the kind of guy who prefers to name all my Apple hardware with the actual name of the product. For example, my phone is named “iPhone 7 Plus,” my Apple Watch Series 2 Nike+ is named “Apple Watch Nike+”, my computer has the “MacBook Air” name and so forth.

I got my Apple wireless earbuds the other day and the very first thing I did after pairing was venture into Settings and rename them from “Chris’s AirPods” into just “AirPods”. But, alas, they’d stubbornly switch back to the default name whenever I reconnected to them.

AirPods keep renaming themselves

As mentioned, my AirPods revert back to the default “FIRSTNAME’s AirPods” name every time I switch to them from my Apple TV or Mac and back to my iPhone. The same thing happens if I put them in the charging case. While my Mac and Apple TV keep the “AirPods” name, the earbuds automatically revert to “Chris’s AirPods” as soon as they re-connect to the phone.

This first-world problem only manifest itself when you rename your AirPods as “AirPods”.

Give them any other name—like “My AirPods” or “Apple AirPods”, for instance—and it sticks across iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. If you’re the type of person who cannot be bothered to rename your AirPods into anything else other than “AirPods,” we have a workaround for you.

How to rename your AirPods as “AirPods”

The inability to remember the “AirPods” name is likely a bug in the firmware that may be fixed with a future software update. Until Apple address the issue, you can simply add a trailing space to the “AirPods” name.

1) On your iOS device, go to Settings → Bluetooth.

NOTE: Be sure that your AirPods are paired with your iOS device and connected to it. On iOS, you can connect to any of your paired wireless headphones in Control Center: swipe your way to the Now Playing card and select your AirPods in the audio output menu at the bottom.

Open System Preferences and click the Bluetooth icon. With the earbuds connected to the computer, right-click them in the list and choose the Rename option from the popup menu.

Now type “AirPods ” in the field (crucially, don’t forget to append that important trailing space at the end!), click the Rename button to confirm the action and you’re good to go.

And that’s all there’s to it, folks!

Your earbuds will now keep that “AirPods ” name, even if you connect and re-connect to them from any of your iCloud-enabled devices. The old name may still appear in the menus on your devices until the changes propagate via iCloud. Don’t worry, as soon as you connect to them the “AirPods ” name shall be displayed in the menus.

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It’s a wrap-up!

And that’s it, ladies and gents.

You can now rename your AirPods into “AirPods” if you don’t mind the extra space and rest assured they won’t rename themselves back to “FIRSTNAME’s AirPods”. Let us know how you liked this simple yet effective workaround by posting a comment below.

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